Archive for the ‘Jimmy Shine’ tag

Long before he became known for his appearances on hot rod-related television shows, long before he started traveling the globe as a hot rodding celebrity, Jimmy Shine set the hot rodding world on its ear with his chopped and channeled 1934 Ford pickup, a hot rod so aggressive and radical that it would take years for other hot rod builders to catch up to its aesthetic. Now that they have, Shine has decided to let the pickup go at auction next month.

The son of a Southern California hot rodder, Shine (which he prefers over Falschlehner, his surname) began building hot rods when he was 14, but it wasn’t until 1997, more than a decade later, that he would begin the build of his pickup. Starting with a 1934 Ford cab and frame that he bought for $500 out of a friend’s backyard (and that had previously weathered for some time in a dry riverbed), Shine said he built it to work out an idea he had for what a pickup of that era should look like.

Photos courtesy Jimmy Shine.

“I wanted something that was low-slung, with a lot of nostalgia period pieces on it,” he said. “I did a lot of drawings on paper napkins. I was always thinking about what I would have built had I been alive and racing in postwar Southern California—what would I have learned from those motor pool guys who came back from the war?” In particular, he said he took inspiration from Roy Desbrow’s Ford pickup, a full-fendered hot rod sporting a mild chop and channel. “Desbrow improved the look, but you couldn’t really tell if you didn’t know it wasn’t stock. That’s just smart.”

So Shine kicked up the rear frame rails 18 degrees and added a 1940 Ford crossmember and 1940 Ford leaf spring pack in the back. Up front, he installed a Model A crossmember and designed a suicide front suspension, with the solid axle positioned suicide-style out in front of the grille shell and the 1934 Ford transverse leaf spring mounted to the modified radius rods. To make it all work, Shine fabricated a number of items, including the steering arms and all the mounting points.

The fabrication continued when it came time to install the body. He chopped the cab five inches, channeled it six, and fabricated the entire floor and bellypan. For the bed, he pieced together some reproduction Studebaker pieces, some reproduction Ford pieces, and some hand-fabricated pieces; for the grille, he took a 1934 Ford commercial piece, sectioned and channeled it, and then added a peak to the top. Inside, he installed a narrowed 1940 Ford dash, 1940 Ford gauges, 1940 Ford steering wheel, hand-fabricated pedals, and a pair of Air Force-sourced bucket seats.

The engine, a 1949 Ford 8AB flathead V-8, uses a Potvin camshaft, Edelbrock 7.5:1 compression ratio cylinder heads, an Edelbrock dual-carb intake manifold, a pair of Stromberg 97 carburetors, and hand-fabricated zoomie headers. It runs through a 1939 Ford three-speed manual transmission. Initially, Shine fitted Ford wire wheels, but has since switched over to a set of wagon-style wheels he fabricated himself.

As for the paint (or lack thereof), Shine said he intended to paint the pickup black all along. “One of the luxuries I don’t have with building cars for my customers is that I have to hand over to them a turnkey car, painted and all,” he said. “But I’m kind of a perfectionist, and with my vehicles, I want to drive them and change them even after I’ve got them on the road, and I don’t want to get in there and repaint and repolish everything. So I bolted the truck together and started driving it in raw steel, and the first time I took it out—to the March Meet, driving over the Grapevine in the snow and the mud and the rain—people went berserker over the bare steel. I said, ‘So what? I gotta think somebody before me did that,’ but a lot of people still credit me for being the first to run a car without any paint at all.”

Shine said he didn’t set out to build a groundbreaking hot rod. “I certainly didn’t reinvent the wheel,” he said. “I just took inspiration from a lot of various sources.” However, the overall aesthetic of his pickup—elements already enshrined in the hot rod builder’s playbook, but remixed with a devil-may-care, chopper-influenced attitude—would go on to set the tone for much of the traditional hot rodding movement over the ensuing 15 years.

“It’s been absolutely overwhelming,” Shine said of the response to the pickup. “The pickup’s had a life of its own—it’s been to Japan, all over the world.” It’s appeared in magazines. It drove around a dry lake in the video for ZZ Top’s “I Gotsta Get Paid” a couple of years ago. Fans of the truck have even had its image tattooed on themselves. And the exposure that Shine got through the pickup would help him land roles on automotive-themed reality television shows, including Car Warriors and Hard Shine.

With other builds on his mind, though, Shine said it was time to send the pickup along to a new home, so he’s consigned it with Barrett-Jackson for the auction house’s Scottsdale event, where the pickup will cross the block with no reserve.

Barrett-Jackson’s 2015 Scottsdale auction will take place January 10-18. For more information, visit Barrett-Jackson.com.

California Car Cover Company’s 12th Annual National Street Rod Association Appreciation Day set an all-time attendance record for the San Fernando Valley-based hot rod show. Over 650 enthusiasts gathered at California Car Cover Company’s headquarters on May 24 to view 490 of Southern California’s hottest customs, street rods and muscle cars that were dispersed on the parking lots, grassy areas and side streets that border the facility.

This year’s event also featured several celebrity appearances by Jay Leno, George Barris and the 2007 NSRA Appreciation Day honoree, Jimmy Shine. Shine, an award-winning fabricator made famous on thousands of So-Cal Speed Shop T-shirts, cruised to the event in his all-black 200-mph race car, and was greeted by a line of fans ready to get their favorite apparel and other accessories autographed.

Next to arrive was Jay Leno, driving his famous Tank-Car, a 1,792-cubic-inch, fuel-injected, twin-turbocharged V-12 M47 Patton tank engine. The event wrapped with an appearance by “King of Kustomizers” and legendary hot rod builder, George Barris.

“This event continues to grow. We’re setting record attendance and featuring more and more vehicles every year,” said Jim DeFrank, president of California Car Cover Company. “We’d like to thank everyone for coming out to this year’s NSRA Appreciation Day, and we look forward to seeing everyone again next year.”

The 13th Annual NSRA Appreciation Day event will be held in May 2008 at California Car Cover Company in Chatsworth, California. Further event details including date, time and honoree will be announced in early 2008.

(This post originally appeared in the May 31, 2007, issue of the Hemmings eWeekly Newsletter.)

While the Grand National Roadster Show of a couple of weeks ago crowns the hot rod world’s top roadster every year, the Detroit Autorama hosts the princes of the scene, giving them a chance to shine right alongside the kings.
Top among the attractions for the March 3-5 event will be the presentation of the Don Ridler Memorial Award, presented to the top debut of the show. Many high-end builders have aimed their latest creations’ premieres straight at the Autorama, so expect high quality in the show car field.
Along with that competition, look for the Autorama Extreme – the show’s concession to homebuilt rods, rat rods and traditional rods as well as sport compacts and tuners. The Extreme portion started in the basement of Cobo Hall last year, featuring hot rod clubs in the tradition of some of the first great indoor shows of the 1950s, a pinstripers’ jamboree and awards presented by George Barris, Chip Foose and Jimmy Shine.
Regular Autorama features this year include displays for the Munster Coach, one of the original Batmobiles, Ken Fenical’s ThunderRoad and one of the first appearances of Fenical’s Aeroliner.
For more information, visit www.autorama.com

(This post originally appeared in the February 2, 2006, issue of the Hemmings eWeekly Newsletter.)